twovictorianladies

My husband and I have very different tastes in music, but we have enough areas of common ground so that we can usually find enough CD’s we can both listen to if we’re going to be in the car together for an extended period of time.  When I was in the library yesterday looking for a few CD’s in these categories that we can both tolerate and haven’t heard forty dozen times, I started thinking how much easier it must have been when there was only classical music to worry about. (And yes, for the purists, I am aware that technically, “classical” music means only that which was produced over about 75 years or so in the late 18th and very early 19th century – I’m using the generic rather than the specific sense here.) But then it occurred to me that musical tastes will always differ no matter what the era, and I could just hear someone complaining, “You don’t want to listen to that awful Tchaikowski fellow, do you? He’s so MODERN! What about some nice Mozart?”

I’ve finally found him a home!

I created a character for my very first book – you know, the one I wrote in college that will never see the light of day until it gets  a thorough re-working because I was so young when I wrote it? Yes, that one. By the final draft, though, he never appeared in person; he was referred to several times by other characters, but he never actually put in an appearance. But he was a good character, so I’ve been trying ever since to find a place for him.

At first I thought he was going to appear in my Victorian series, and a version of him does exist there. But the differences between modern America and mid-nineteenth century England changed him somewhat, and he wasn’t really the same person any more. I’ve decided they’re related, by the way – the Victorian version is the many times great grandfather of the modern version; ask me and I can tell you the entire geneology.

Then I tried to put him into my mystery series. That worked for a time, but again I found the character adapting to the new set of circumstances I was creating so I changed his name and let him be his own person. He was going to anyway, no matter what I said, so instead of fighting him I just let nature (fiction?) take its course.

I wanted my poor, homeless (bookless?) character to be the hero of my book on culture shock, but that didn’t work at all. Just as the book didn’t do what I wanted, the hero of that book also had far more to say, and do, than I had meant him to, and they weren’t the right things for my still displaced character to say and do. He was completely wrong for that role and it didn’t take long for me to realize it.

But oddly enough, that was the book where he finally landed. Not as the hero, but as the hero’s mentor.  Suddenly, three quarters of the way through, without my knowing in advance that he was going to be there, my displaced character showed up and gave my hero the stern talking to he needed. They’re good friends now, and when I ever get around to writing a sequel to that one (it’s on the table – there are just several others in front of it – I think I need to learn to write with both sides of my brain at once) he’s got a firm place in it. Right from the beginning.

And I am left to wonder if he is the square peg, the round hole, or if I should just write the whole experience off as a parallelogram and be done with it?

Even after spending four fifths of my life in the US, my time in Canada still affects me. My brother once commented that he’s too American to be fully comfortable in England, but too Canadian to be fully comfortable in the US, and that about sums it up. There’s still something deep in me that nestles down happily every time my plane lands in Calgary or Toronto, or I drive across the Ambassador Bridge, or get off the ferry in Nova Scotia and whispers, “I’m home!”

And of course, England has always been my spiritual home. Large portions of my writing takes place there, though for different reasons. The historical novels take place there because for plot reasons I needed an older landscape than can be found in the US. The second of my mysteries has a big section that takes place there because, again for plot reasons, my characters need to be doing some distant travel and that’s the “distant” locale I’m most comfortable with.

But the mainstream fiction was written specifically to deal with my realization that I’m still, even after all this time, experiencing a form of culture shock. I frequently don’t even know if I’m using American, Canadian, or English idiom, for example. A dear friend is British and when I talk to her, I find myself homesick. My intent was to write a story about culture shock; about a British girl coming to the US and attempting to deal with the different lifestyle. I really wanted to address this situation, particularly since so few people really understand that Canada and the US do not share the same culture, even though we share a common border many thousand miles long, and more or less share a language. (They mostly understand that England and the US do not.)

But while I managed to get some of that into the story, I ended up writing a very different book than I intended. A different character took over and insisted that I write about him, too. Instead of her story, it became their story. And leaving him out would have been problematic, since the story itself wanted him there.

So when I next pick that series up I’m going to try again. No doubt the book will have its own ideas and steer me in a different direction, but sooner or later, I’ll get the book written that I really want to write.  The book rules!

Okay, here’s where I stand at the moment.

Three series started:

Series one – two complete books, both in need of final polishing, a third in outline stages with the first chapter written.

Series two – one book complete, second book only in outline stages with a few odd scenes written here and there

Series three – two books, each approximately half done.

And an unrelated book in outline stages, with approximately one half of one chapter complete.

And the idea for still another with nothing on paper.

I really have to find a way to write on the train….

Having been encompassed in Victorian etiquette for some months now, I was rather shocked at an episode I witnessed on the subway today. I did not see the woman with the cane get on but the woman  beside me did, and immediately made the conductor aware that there was someone sitting in a “premium” seat that should have been offered to the lame woman. The conductor pointed out that the car was too crowded for her to get there; it would have to wait till the next stop unless someone wanted to call down. The woman who was complaining then sat down in the empty seat beside me. Apparently it was all right for someone else to give up their seat, but not for her to give one up. I got off at the next stop and as I left the car, I could hear the same woman calling to the disabled lady, offering her my seat.

While I will grant that the person in the premium seat, which is marked specifically as one that you should give up for the disabled, should have done so, I couldn’t help but see the irony in my neighbor’s insistance that everyone else should give up their seats, while not making any effort to give up her own.

I was over at a friend’s house this afternoon and we had a power outage for a couple of hours. We were just about to make a cup of coffee (for her) and a cup of tea (for me) but we had to cancel that idea because both the coffee maker and the teapot were electric, as was the stove. We were able to keep working on the project we’d been spending the afternoon on, at least temporarily, since our computers’ batteries were more or less full, but I had to shut down after a while as my battery got low. I couldn’t call home because her phone’s battery wasn’t charged and I couldn’t get a cell phone signal. Although my friend had bought food for dinner, it required heating up. She was about to suggest that we go out for dinner when she realized that her car was trapped in the garage behind electric doors that wouldn’t open without power. (At least my car was out in the driveway, accessible!) And when she asked me to look up the number of the electric company so that she could report the outage, I couldn’t, because with no power the wireless router had gone out and I had no internet connection.

A hundred and fifty years ago when my characters were living, or would have if they were not fictional, they cooked on wood stoves, traveled by horse power (even if in carriages), and sent messages from house to house either by footman, or by the extremely efficient (at that time) postal service.  A power outage? What was that?

We are owned by our labor-saving devices.

Look out world – Cathie now has a place to do all her musings. Heaven knows what kind of nonsense will be created here!

But you’re welcome to read those of my thoughts and comments that I choose to share here.

It’s been interesting, writing about the mid-Victorian period. Historical accuracy is a bit difficult, since the era covered so many years, and the Industrial Revolution took place mid-stream. But once you stop to think about it, it really isn’t all that long ago.

Queen Victoria was still on the throne, with a decade left to reign, when my grandfather was born in 1891. I was in my last year of college when he died. He was twelve when the Wright Brothers flew the Kitty Hawk; at the time of Grandpa’s death, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon was a decade in the past. Sometimes I think we all live on the point of a tesseract and if we only knew how, we could just fold up the fabric of time and move from place to place – or time to time.

Most of my characters were born in the 1820’s and 1830’s, and are in their late teens and early to mid twenties at the time I am writing about. But if they were real people and not fictional creations, I could easily be have been in the room with someone who, at one time, had been in the room with one of them. They could easily have lived until after my grandfather was born, for example, and I was certainly in the room with him often enough.  Author and former Librarian of Congress Charles Goodrum points out in one of his books that a man could have met both Thomas Jefferson and a very young Ronald Reagan.

But despite my awe at the swiftness at the passing of time, I’m still left with some frustrating research; in  1850s England would diapers have been referred to as nappies as they are now?  Did the term, “have a field day” have the same meaning, as in, The scandalmongers would have a field day with this”. If someone has been “pacing like a caged lion” – were there actually lions in cages at the time – when did zoos as we know them, start? I’ve found the answers to two of these questions, but still am searching for the third. And who knows what other questions will come up as I continue?